88 - The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics

The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics
By Jean Porter
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1990. 208 pp. $24.95.

The great irony of contemporary Christian ethics, says Jean Porter in her excellent study of the philosophical moral theory in the Summa Theologica, is that Aquinas' influence among contemporary Protestant ethicists may be as great, or greater, than it is among Catholic ethicists. Stanley Hauerwas draws heavily on Aquinas to develop his ethic of virtue. James Gustafson calls Aquinas one of the benchmarks of his own work and considers Aquinas' treatment of Aristotelian science analogous to his own treatment of modern biology and physics. Moreover, although Gene Outka develops his views from nineteenth and twentieth-century sources, Porter believes his account of agape as equal regard has many similarities to Aquinas' natural law commitment to equal immunity from harm. Of course, many contemporary Catholic moral theologians are also indebted to Aquinas, but proportionalists like Charles Curran and Richard McCormick owe far more to secular utilitarians like Mill and Bentham, while Germain Grisez and John Finnis, the leading natural law theorists of our day, admit that their largely Kantian project departs from the views of the Angelic Doctor in significant ways.

However, irony is not all that characterizes Aquinas' place in contemporary Christian ethics. Porter considers fragmentation another of its marks, since those who do draw on Aquinas' work do so incompletely. They grab hold of a single fragment of his ethical theory and use it to develop their own. Porter, who teaches Christian ethics at Notre Dame, considers this unfortunate and argues that, in every case, the result is an incomplete and, thus, inadequate moral theory, one that stands without the other pieces that Aquinas had fitted together into a unified and coherent portrait of the moral life. The best evidence for this conclusion, says Porter, comes from the nature of the debate among contemporary Christian ethicists, where charges of incompleteness and incoherence are common and normally justified. The fragmented use of Aquinas is, thus, both a cause and a sign of the profound inadequacy of contemporary Christian ethics.

The mention of a fragmented moral inheritance, of a past inhabited by moralists who produced theories that were coherent and whole, and of a contemporary scene burdened with fundamental disagreement over the shape and content of an adequate account of the moral life calls to mind Alasdair MacIntyre's gloomy portrait of modern moral philosophy in After Virtue. Porter admits that her diagnosis of contemporary Christian ethics is indebted to MacIntyre's work, but she is not interested in duplicating his project and narrating the transition from

90 - The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics

coherence to fragmentation in Christian ethics. Instead, she wishes to describe what a complete and coherent moral theory looks like, using Aquinas' work as an example. Her aim is to show how Aquinas's moral theory stands whole, to place that theory in conversation with contemporary concerns, and, ultimately, to show how contemporary Christian ethics pales in comparison. Consequently, her principal debt is not to After Virtue, but to MacIntyre's subsequent work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? There he provides his own account of Aquinas' moral theory, which Porter both draws upon and argues against as she develops her own reading of Aquinas. But MacIntyre also does something that helps us place Porter's reading in relation to others and, thus, understand her work aright. MacIntyre shows how Aquinas took the moral fragments of his own day-Augustinian, Stoic, neo-Platonic, and Aristotelian-and pieced them together into a new moral theory. He goes on to argue that the outcome was fragile, full of the tensions and contradictions, both real and apparent, that naturally follow from uniting in one view previously competing accounts of the moral life. Not surprisingly, this fragility creates profound differences among interpreters of Aquinas. Some emphasize his debt to Aristotle and argue that the judgments of right reason constitute the standard of goodness and determine the content of the good life. Ralph McInerny's Ethica Thomistica comes to mind. Others try to hold together the Aristotelian side of Aquinas' view with the Stoic sections of the secunda secundae. This is MacIntyre's tack. Still others think that Aquinas derives judgments about the content of the good life and the norms that give it shape from his discussion of the natural structure of the human person. These Stoic readings of Aquinas draw heavily on his treatment of natural law, which brings us to Porter.

Porter's rigorous and creative explication of Aquinas' moral theory should be seen as one of the best recent Stoic readings. This is not to say that hers is just another account of Aquinas on natural law. Porter is far too careful a scholar to think Aquinas wrote a treatise on law that can be read apart from the rest of the Summa. Besides, her desire is to see Aquinas' moral theory whole, with all its scattered fragments in place, and this she accomplishes with great skill and clarity. She deftly shows how Aquinas weaves together his general theory of goodness, his ontology, and his account of creaturely flourishing, and, then, shows how the connections that result dissolve the commonplace (for us) distinctions between fact and value, justice and self-interest. She successfully clears away some of the modern stumbling blocks to Aquinas' moral theory: his metaphysical biology, his anthropocentism, his moral realism, his hierarchical understanding of creation's order, and his insistence that all human actions are directed toward some final end. She shows why Aquinas considers communal and individual good mutually dependent and why he thinks certain actions are absolutely prohibited. She articulates the importance of the virtues in Aquinas' theory, and she gives a fresh and courageous reading of his

91 - The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics

account of practical reason. All along, she places Aquinas' views in conversation with those of Finnis and Grisez, Gustafson, Outka, and Hauerwas, pointing out the advantages of his position and showing how their criticisms miss the mark. Still, the centerpiece of the book is her account of the goods that constitute a flourishing human life and her derivation of the fundamental precepts of justice from them, and it depends upon her Stoic reading of Aquinas' discussion of natural law.

This is an ambitious project, and students of Aquinas' moral theory will find plenty to disagree with, particularly those who consider his views more Aristotelian than Stoic, even his treatment of natural law. Porter might respond by arguing that when Aquinas is brought closer to Aristotle, his decidedly Stoic remarks, such as those found in his treatment of lying and homosexuality, appear strangely anomalous. His account of the moral life begins to look fragmented and incoherent itself, a conclusion Porter must reject, as it defeats her desire to contrast Aquinas' coherent moral theory with the fragmentation she finds in contemporary Christian ethics. But perhaps fragmentation is just the point. Aquinas' moral theory is motley, a collection of often conflicting and competing fragments. It is certainly more comprehensive than the theories of contemporary ethicists and his description of the moral life, more complete. And yet, MacIntyre is certainly right to emphasize the diverse sources of Aquinas' views, and thus we should not be surprised to discover that his moral theory is burdened with various contradictions.

Happily, Porter's achievement is not diminished if Aquinas' moral theory is, in fact, less coherent than she believes. Here is not a wistful retrieval project that encourages us to abandon the difficulties and problematics that drive our contemporary moral reflections for some happy and coherent past; therefore, nothing turns on the perfect coherence of Aquinas' views. Rather, Porter's hope is that contemporary Christian ethicists will recognize the comprehensiveness of Aquinas' views and thus be encouraged to participate in a most Thomistic task: piecing together the fragments of our Christian and secular moral inheritance into a complete, and at least provisionally coherent, account of the Christian moral life. And, since Aquinas' moral theory is a principal and compelling part of that inheritance, she hopes that this effort will include a serious engagement with it. To this end we are much in her debt.

John R. Bowlin
University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma